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Campus Technology Magazine Traces Increased Retention Rates with Wimba at Tulsa CC

Keeping Them Online and in School: Using data to track and manage student enrollment is steadily becoming a standard practice on both two-year and four-year campuses.

View the original article in Campus Technology here

By Dian Schaffhauser

Using data to track and manage student enrollment is steadily becoming a standard practice on both two-year and four-year campuses. Data mining enables colleges to create predictive models for identifying behaviors that put students at risk for dropping out, flag students who engage in these behaviors, and help identify practices that work in retaining at-risk student populations. Community colleges face particular retention challenges-- both new and evergreen-- that require creative ways of thinking about data-driven retention strategies. For example, as online-course enrollment booms for two-year institutions, online attrition follows suit. And tracking high-risk student groups (such as athletes) is a necessary but insufficient tactic to keep them enrolled on campuses where support services are stressed by limited resources. Here’s a look at two community colleges that are successfully taking on enrollment and retention challenges. 

TULSA COMMUNITY COLLEGE usually has an online program enrollment of 10,000 out of a total enrollment of 26,000. This past fall semester it was closer to 11,000. “We’re busting at the seams,” declares Randy Dominguez, dean of distance learning for the four-campus system in Oklahoma. 

Unfortunately, those seams are leaking as well. Dominguez reports that these online classes had a higher drop rate than campus classes, a problem that has been persistently true for the college’s distance learning courses. 

Tulsa can take some heart in knowing it is not alone in this problem. According to a 2007 literature review on strategies for reducing distance learning attrition, “Attrition rates for classes taught through distance education are 10 to 20 percent higher than classes taught in a face-to-face setting.” The reasons, according to the study, are many: difficulties with time management, personal issues (finances, child care, job demands), and problems with the courses themselves (unclear directions, inadequate support, lack of feedback from the instructor, and so forth). Dominguez believes that many of his students have unrealistic expectations of what taking an online course means: “A lot of times people think it’s going to be easier. They drop when they find it’s not. Or they think it’s flexible, so they may not even log in for several weeks. Then they find out they’re behind and decide to drop the class.”

Stemming Online Attrition

Not content to see this kind of continual fallout, during the summer of 2009 Dominguez started a pilot project to see how he could use online tools to help the college boost online retention numbers. “I’m a technology person and I’m a little more tool-oriented,” he points out. “I want to find things to help us do the job, not just rely on our own processes getting better.”

The school went with Starfish Early Alert from Starfish Retention Solutions, an early-warning and student-tracking system that plugs into the campus Blackboard Learn (Release 8) environment. Starfish Early Alert allows the college to identify at-risk behaviors before students withdraw. The customer sets flags, which act as alerts to notify the college about some event or activity that signals disengagement on the part of the student-- processes that formerly were handled by faculty manually. 

At Tulsa, alerts are generated, for example, when a student goes seven days without logging into Blackboard; if an assignment is 24 hours late or seven days late; if a grade point average falls below 70 percent; and, most recently, if a midterm is missed. Once a flag is raised for a given student, faculty, advisers, and administrators receive e-mail alerts. In some instances, the student also receives an e-mail, sent from Starfish itself to the e-mail address maintained in the Blackboard system for that student. 

The project is new enough that Dominguez can’t yet determine its effectiveness, but he is convinced that Starfish will assist Tulsa with its early remediation efforts, if only because it has already helped with his most persistent headache: initial student log-in. “My biggest problem has always been getting some students to log in for that first time,” he says. “This summer I had 35 students. I had about eight who did not log in. When we started Starfish up two weeks into the class, those [automated] e-mails started going out. They all logged in. They all engaged in the class. They’d ignore a message from the instructor directly, but not the message from Starfish.” Other instructors were reporting similar responses. He admits that he’s baffled by the change in student behavior, but nonetheless pleased.

The Early Alert program is open on an opt-in basis to other faculty running online courses; for the summer pilot, 25 online instructors chose to participate. Tulsa also will shortly implement Starfish Connect to allow online instructors to set up online office hours. Starfish will manage the calendar and scheduling piece, and faculty will communicate using Wimba Classroom, a virtual classroom environment that allows faculty and students to interact via audio, video, chat, and application sharing. 

Ultimately, says Dominguez, technology is an enabler for the larger challenge of human engagement. “This is a people issue. We need to better engage with our students, faculty, and staff, and it’s not going to happen on its own unless you have tools to create those connections.”